Brokers and security issuers produce tens of thousands of investment research reports, sales brochures, annual reports and the like annually. These reports are carefully prepared and edited by analysts and marketers from textual and graphical information using desk top publishing systems. The completed reports which may be color printed and run many pages in length are delivered not only to the brokers' branch and retail offices, but also to institutional investors. Millions of dollars are spent to prepare, print and mail these reports, yet no mechanism other than word of mouth exists for authors/brokers to determine readership of their reports.
On the other side of Wall Street, institutional investors are besieged with investment research reports --many portfolio/fund managers receive over three feet of investment research reports per week. As a result, as many as 65% of the reports are thrown out unopened, and less than 10% of the reports are ever read. Even the 35% or so of equity research reports which are retained by institutions, readership is likely to be very low since there is no easy way to quickly access reports relevant to any particular subject of interest. Further, the cost of report retention is significant and may be prohibitive.
What is desired by authors/brokers therefore is a system for distributing their investment research reports on a real time basis in its original form and for directing investors' attention to reports of particular interest to them. A system which subsequently provides feedback on report readership is also desired. What is desired by institutional investors is a system for obtaining real time access to current investment research reports of primary interest to the investor in the authors'/brokers' original form (including text, graphics and layout). The capabilities to archive older investment research and to enable searching of current and archived reports is also desired.
Multi-user database systems for electronically storing and retrieving documents are well known. Some of these systems, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,553,261 4,748,678 4,941,125 5,109,439 5,187,750 and 5,287,497 store documents as images. A disadvantage of this approach is it requires an excessive amount of memory to store a page of text, increasing costs and access times. A further disadvantage is that text stored as an image may not be retrieved using a word search. Moreover, even though storage as an image permits retrieval of the document in its original form, the digitizing process necessarily reduces resolution of the image from the original, such that a document reconstituted from the image data will be of lower quality than an author's original, and consequently may be less well-received by a reader.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,186,438 and col. 2, lines 26-29 of U.S. Pat. No. 5,230,073 disclose a system including a complete host database and a partial local database of the most recently requested files. The local database is periodically updated by deletion of the least frequently used files. The system of the '438 patent is designed for airline reservations such that the host and local databases are fairly static and the local database generally only includes flight information on regional airports for fast access, while information on other airports is available from the host. In addition to faster access for most users, the overall cost is reduced and reliance on communication links is eliminated.
The '073 patent is directed to a broadcast oriented database architecture for large volume inquiry systems (i.e. operator assistance) including a data pump for cyclically broadcasting the entire database over a high band width medium (e.g. optical fiber). The broadcast may be analyzed by a plurality of record retrieval elements simultaneously, and no indexing of the database is necessary. An upstream channel from each retrieval element to the pump is provided for updating the database.
Other database systems, such as Thomson Financial Services' First Call system for equity research information, store only the text portions of documents. These databases are more memory efficient than image-based systems and support word-search document retrieval, but are generally not capable of rendering the document in the author's original form, and do not typically include storage of nontext portions of documents such as graphics and layout information.
More recently, portable ROMs have been introduced which store mixed format documents as combinations of text with graphics, sound, video and the like. A disadvantage of these systems is that the stored information is not able to be distributed on a real time basis due to the time required for manufacturing and delivery of the ROM. Further, the time and effort required for switching ROMs and for accessing information on the ROMs may also be disadvantageous. The cost of providing enough storage to each user to permit archival searching may be prohibitive, and the portability of these systems does not lend itself to tracking readership of individual documents.
There is a need in the database art to provide a system which notifies users of current documents of interest to the users, and permits immediate retrieval from users' locations of such documents in the author's original form. A system which also permits searching of current and archived documents at a shared-access host location is also needed, as is a system which subsequently reports use of documents back to authors.